Canadian Federalism: A Giant Clusterfuck - Chapter 2

Below are a few more problems with Canadian federalism, the system that gives a certain list of powers to the provinces and a different list to the federal government except where they are shared or overlap in a million different ways.

See, back when Canada was getting started there was a great deal of "colonial diversity," which is to say that there was a sharp contrast between the white, northern European, Christian farmers in Nova Scotia and the white, northern European, Christian farmers in Quebec. Canadian hero John A. MacDonald originally wanted to impose a unitary system on this cornucopia of cultural diversity, but after seeing the United States torn apart in the four bloodiest years of warfare ever witnessed on the continent when the American federalism collapsed, Mr. MacDonald changed his mind and favoured a federalist system because of course he did.

At first there were some fairly bright lines between the two levels of government responsibility, but the modern Supreme Court of Canada has decided that that approach was too easy for everyone involved and shifted instead towards a "flexible" approach to federalism where jurisdictions interact and overlap to make things maximally complicated. Basically, the court's approach to Canadian federalism is to ask everybody to get along, "harmoniously, in the spirit of cooperative federalism."

Since everyone doesn't get along in a system with eleven responsible governments, that leaves us with a bunch of problems: 


Inter-provincial disputes

The federal-provincial battles I talked about in chapter 1 are just a sideshow compared to the inter-provincial battles that take place.

Alberta hates Ontario who hates Quebec who hates every other province. Newfoundland used to hate the rest of the country because we loathed them for gulping transfer payments to maintain the illusion Newfoundland belonged as part of a first-world country; now they loathe us because the tables have turned. New Brunswick is mad because no one cares about New Brunswick (even people from New Brunswick wouldn't notice if the province disappeared from the face of the Earth). British Columbia: (a) resents being stereotyped as Vancouver-only; (b) is pissed off that it didn't get any oil but still wants to participate in Western alienation and hate Ontario; and, (c) is mad that it will never win a Stanley Cup.

Tensions are exacerbated by assymetrical federalism that gives hicks on Prince Edward Island more seats in the House of Commons than they have high school diplomas and guarantees Quebec 25% of the seats in the House of Commons, contradicting the basic democratic principle that each citizen's vote should be worth the same amount.

These tensions manifest themselves during inter-provincial negotiations and drag all of us down by giving cabinet ministers axes to grind when they should be focused on negotiating concordances that maximize everyone's interests.


Redundant laws

If nothing else, federalism creates redundancies. You have 10 different provinces regulating "property and civil rights" under section 92(13) of the Constitution Act, 1867. This is important because the Supreme Court of Canada has basically said that "property and civil rights" is most things that can be regulated. Canadians in general agree on what the law should be in some cases so all ten provinces have their own similar -- but slightly different -- versions of the same laws and regulations whose only differences are below the level of what the average citizen cares about.

For example, every province has their own version of the law for changing your name. That is not the end of the world in and of itself, but it is just one example of a phenomenon that is repeated for every area of regulation. When everything is being regulated, it adds up to a lot of superfluous redundancy. And having so many variations of the same thing adds nothing to the quality of life of Canadians nor, I suspect, do they care about it. Ask a hundred what the law on changing your name is or should be and I bet approximately 2.7 of them will have any opinion or knowledge and that holds true even if half of them are lawyers.

Small provinces like PEI don't have the population to justify customized laws on every subject; that's why they will simply copy the laws in Ontario or other provinces onto their books wholesale sometimes.

Further redundancy in the law is caused by overlaps between provincial and federal authority. The Canadian model of federalism exacerbates the multi-jurisdiction problem by not having cleanly circumscribed ambits of authority for the federal and provincial governments. A good example of this is family law because marriage and divorce are federal matters so divorcing families deal with their issues using a separate sets of Acts (such as the Divorce Act) from the couples that never married even though both courts deal with child support, spousal support, custody, and access. They even use the same guidelines for child and spousal support, and they use the same test (a child's "best interests") for custody and access.

Extra resources spent

Another cost of federalism is all the extra money we end up spending for little return. For example, we have way more elections, each of which costs a significant sum ($120 million in Ontario last October) and, as a special bonus, contribute to voter apathy.

Extra resources are also spent because you have 10 versions of the same committee for each major question facing a province. This is true even when there is no good reason for provinces to disagree about the course of action, such as with cancer treatments since medical science in one province should be the same as in any other province. Maybe some provinces can afford to spend more than others but that should not be the case because equalization payments are intended to guarantee the same levels of service across the country.

Another good example is the ratings of films as appropriate for certain audiences, like "PG" and "NC-17". Unlike their American counterparts, Canadian film ratings are decided by each province individually. Unless the citizens of each province have significant differences of opinion on how much boob should be shown on television


Federal-Provincial Battles 2

I already talked about the squabbles between the federal government and the provinces that can only exist because of federalism, but I came across another good example so I want to bring it back up. Basically, Alberta and Canada are fighting over who gets to tax aboriginal cigarettes. That's stupid enough to begin with since Canadians don't care which level of governments taxes what exactly as long as there is enough as each level to balance the budgets, but it also highlights another unnecessary complication of federalism in Canada: jurisdiction over aboriginal affairs.

Aboriginal reserves are supposed to be federally administered within the provinces. That means that even if a province is running a perfectly good police force (police being a provincial responsibility under subsection 92(14) of the Constitution Act, 1967) in the area or a perfectly good hospital (subsection 92(7)), it would be a federal responsibility to administer police and hospitals on the reserve. So there are pockets of federal responsibility for what would otherwise a provincial concern dotting all the provinces wherever there are reserves. Add to that the complications caused by the disputed and (relatively) new aboriginal right under the Constitution Act, 1982 to aboriginal sovereignty.

Here is another example of federal-provincial incompatibility and intractability: I was speaking to a judge a while back. He happens to be a Superior Court judge so he is a federal employee (whereas if he were an Ontario Court of Justice judge he would be a provincial employee and show up on the sunshine list, for example). Because the courts are administered provincially and he works at the courthouse his secretary is a provincial employee. When it came time to hire a new secretary for him he was allowed to sit in on the interviews but could not ask any questions because it was strictly a provincial hire, even though he is the guy who is going to be the secretary’s boss and will be the most affected by the hire. He is also, being a judge, in a position you would think would command him some degree of power over his situation, but nope, federalism.

Board Shame

Pretty sure I'm addicted to sugar because I played Candyland as a kid. The game has nothing to do with learning to read or counting, but it has everything to do with mouth-watering images of sweets. There's no strategy so you brain can really focus on the succulent images of Chocolate Marshes and Peppermint Stick Forests. Yeah, like that's not habit-forming; why not just stick a heroin needle in my arm, Mom! Nobody mentioned diabeatus when I was taking the shortcut along Gumdrop Pass!

Punxsutawney Thrawn

I step outside, pale and feeble after months and months of living indoors. A black fly lands on my forearm. Three more months of de facto winter.

New Democratic Apathy

After the Liberals submitted their last budget to the Ontario legislature a few weeks ago, the NDP setup a toll-free hotline and a website to give Ontario's citizens voters taxpayers "everyday folks" a chance to let the party know their reaction to the budget. The NDP described the response to their hotline as a "flood" whereas I would describe it more as the democratic tap not being turned all the way off after the election and a few annoying drops landing on the porcelain (if we are stuck using hydrological metaphors).

Ontario's population is over 12,850,000 yet the NDP only got 10,000* people to contact them about the 2012 budget. That’s only one out of every 1,285 Ontarians. So less than 0.1% of Ontarians could be bothered to contribute to an important discussion about a watershed austerity budget with many long-term consequences. And of those who did get in touch with the NDP, I'm sure a lot of the complaints were about stupid little things like ending subsidies for the horse-racing industry because racetracks and horse breeders urged people to do so, which just seems weird to me.

But at least the NDP got a better understanding of what the 0.1% of Ontarians who contacted them thought of the budget, right? Wrong. The responses they did get it were, "all over the map," according to their leader, so the whole exercise was a waste of time.

Two weeks have gone by since the Liberal budget was tabled and the NDP's full list of proposals still has not been put forward. The NDP had 6 months after the last election to sort out their policy priorities; instead, they waited until the budget was already out before they started soliciting ideas from the public-at-large. Predictably, the public-at-large did not speak with a single voice and this got them nowhere. In other words, the NDP held an ostentatious focus-group that failed to provide any useful feedback and delayed important discussions about the future of the provincial government by at least a week.

I am most surprised that there wasn't more of a reaction from public-sector unions to the Liberal announcement that they are essentially doing away with collective bargaining in the public sector for the next two years and freezing pay. There are approximately one-million public-sector workers in Ontario who would be affected by those proposals and they have strong unions and trade associations to make their special interests heard. In the words of the OPSEU head, “We’ll give [the finance minister] a fight the likes of which he’s never seen and he won’t forget for a long, long time because unions are good at fighting.”

Yet behind this rhetoric, Ontario's public-sector unions could not get even 1% of their members to let the NDP know they would like more money. It makes me suspect that the unions colluded with the NDP to make sure the party was not pressured into forcing an election and now the unions will hammer the Liberals for freezing pay and collective bargaining without mentioning that the NDP supported the budget that contained those same measures in the first place.

*: Most sources I saw actually said it was half that, only 5,000. Maybe the numbers were inflated by repeat callers, prank calls, wrong numbers, and people outside Ontario.

Silver Lining

The Sabres season ended in a depressing fashion but the silver lining is, as always, gambling. I made a bet before the season that Brad Boyes would score less than 57.5 points and I was right by a mile. Boyes finished the season with only 23 points.

I only wish I bet more. With -115 odds, you only win 87 cents on a $1 bet. Still, I will cherish that 87 cents and be able to look back at least somewhat fondly on Brad Boyes going from point-producing NHL forward to someone who gets scratched for Corey Tropp in the biggest game of the year.

DXM

Feels like that time I drank too much cough syrup and fell into the simulacrum.

Ugh, Just Terrible

This is a real thing that exists and will be intentionally broadcast:

The CBC is calling it a "TELEVISION EVENT"! Technically that is in true insofar as it is on television and it meets the bare minimum definition of "event" by being a "thing that happens". But by that standard so is a test pattern.

Why is the CBC doing this? Who was asking for the Don Cherry Story Part I, let alone Part II? I mean, I understand the nepotism behind Don Cherry supporting his son Tim who wrote the first Don Cherry Story and produced the second one, but is the CBC brass really so beholden to Don that they can't say no?

At some point in time, many people with suits and certificates proving they graduated from institutions of higher education sat around a big table in the CBC building on Front Street and decided that, "Yes, another mini-series celebrating a xenophobic curmudgeon is what's best for Canada." And Don Cherry isn't even the benign type of curmudgeon that you encounter every year at Thanksgiving; Don Cherry is a malignancy promulgating prejudice* using a bully pulpit paid for by the Canadian taxpayers.

This is also a real mini-series the CBC made.

It feels like the CBC ran out of ideas about eight years ago so now it is feeding on itself. When they showed a clip of the fictional Coach's Corner from the mini-series on the real Coach's Corner last Saturday it was like a Canadian faux-culture-qua-culture Ouroboros of masturbatory, self-congratulatory, narcissistic, navel-gazing, vainglorious crap. You can watch it yourself at the six-minute mark of the video below or click this link to go right to the six-minute mark.

I was hoping the CBC would at least wait for Don Cherry to die before they made a second multi-part biopic about him. When he does pass away I bet there will be a week-long, round-the-clock tribute to him and his bigotry on all (English) CBC stations and approximately 37 more movies made about his life by the good folks at the CBC. Peter Mansbridge will report on how Cherry died for our sins, George Stroumboulopoulos will interview Elliot Friedman about Cherry's legacy (because Ron McLean is too big a star to come on George's show), and Randy Bachman will talk about his 5 favourite songs that feature the lyrics "cherry" and a G chord for CBC Radio.

Keep in mind that Don Cherry is not really notable outside of the CBC: his career as a hockey player was marginal (one NHL game played), he did not win any Stanley Cups as a coach despite having the greatest hockey player of all time on his team, and he released a series of VHS tapes featuring concussions rock'em, sock'em hits. He wears ugly suits to try and make himself noteworthy which makes him the Canadian equivalent to Craig Sager.

Yet the CBC features him constantly. He gets to rant like your racist great-uncle about the "left-wing pinko media" on the CBC's flagship program every week, he has seven (7!) hours and counting worth of CBC television movies already made about his life, he was featured on an hour-long CBC show called "Who Do You Think You Are" about his family tree, and he gets to blather on boring CBC documentaries and other CBC programs. The CBC claims that "WRATH OF GRAPES: THE DON CHERRY STORY PART II" will uncover who Don Cherry really is but if the Canadian public has not figured it out by now then what hope is there?

Does not include the story of how he blew the Bruins best chance to finally beat Montreal by taking a too many men penalty

According to the 1991 Broadcast Act, the programming on the CBC should reflect the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canada but his views are at odds with Canada’s understanding of multiculturalism. What Don Cherry proves is that as long as you can wrap yourself in the Canadian flag and yell about supporting the troops, you can say pretty much whatever else you want and get paid upwards of $800,000 per year for the privilege of being hero-worshiped.

*: If you watched the linked video where he complains about soccer-style goal celebrations by Europeans, you might have noticed the irony that Cherry labels extravagant goal celebrations as un-Canadian despite the Canadian Football League being known for having ostentatious TD celebrations.